Study! There are so many elements to tarot and while using intuition is a BIG part of it, that should be supplemented with study. If you charge, be sure to calculate the costs of further study in the form of books, courses, training, etc.

Are in conversation with other responsible readers!! It’s important to have a community to go to for advice, accountability, & further knowledge. (My examples include: Damascena Healing Arts ,@aniysathementalpoet, The Rooted Turtle, @thedejaspeaks are a few that come to mind readily

Know when to refer. Readers are privileged to get to know some intimate details of the people they see. And when a detail comes up that you are not licensed or skilled to speak to, you MUST refer!! Tarot readers are not long or short term therapists, financial analysts, or Drs. In sessions, we might discuss or uncover a detail that needs further diving into by a therapist. That is the time to refer! Be sure you have a few contacts on hand for this purpose. Most of the contacts that I use come from The Healing in Our Times Project mini-directory.

Keep confidentiality (unless there are threats to the safety of themselves or others)

Admit when there is something you don’t know & ask questions on interpretation. Reading is a conversation in that AS you read, the querent is also sitting with / processing the images that come to light. There are so many dynamics to attend to and so many reasons why information in a reading may come up “cloudy”. Maybe they aren’t really ready to go “there” – where the card is hinting. Maybe something came up that has yet to develop fully in real-time. Maybe you’re having an off day – we’re human! It’s okay to be honest when there is something that you don’t know. Perhaps it’s only there for the querent to know, decipher, or reflect on. At that point, you become a guide into the symbolism, imagery, and archetypes while they lend their own personal interpretation to that guidance. This is still the work!

Have skill in active listening ALONG with a keen personal knowledge of what grounds you! Before readings, I like to drink a strong tea and make sure I’m warm enough. Simple! But it helps keep me focused on the moment.

What might you add to this list? What do you look for in a wellness provider, reader, or helper?

Last evening, I was so excited to be a Featured Reader at Whine Club: A Monthly Storytelling Series for Women, Femmes, & Gender Non Conforming People alongside other brilliant & powerful readers: Lakshmi Ramgopal (you can sign up for her newsletter), Bria Royal (check out the pocket healing zines on the site), & Katie Burke.

Photo Credit: Keisa, @WhineClubChi

My good friend, Jené, is amazing and crafty and managed to get a good bit of the reading on video (without me even seeing her recording – which was quite good for my nerves lol)! So, now I can share it with you all. The full transcript of content is available below. Follow @WhineClubChi to stay updated on their programming! **Special thanks to all who came out & sat in the chairs & stood in the aisles, to Whine Club & Uncharted Books, & to Ramona – the bookstore pup ❤

Intro:

“I’m a bit of a pragmatist so when I was invited to read, I immediately picked out the two pieces I would do. And then, Keisa sent the theme… It was hope, so I was like, ‘(Expletive) I don’t even know if I’m GOOD at that!’ (laughs) So, I want to offer this piece for those of us who find hope to be ephemeral. Those who hold their hands out and stretch to touch it – finding it like holding snow in their palm – lasting for a moment of precious wonder but all too short lived.

Hope is a complicated thing.

I. Every other week, I show up to my therapist’s office (we’ll call her Khadijah)…

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Full transcript:

Hope is a complicated thing.

Every other week, I show up to my therapist’s office (we’ll call her Khadijah). I take a break from work and get on the train, head up to the 16th floor, guzzle her filtered water from recyclable paper cups, and try to talk about my feelings without theorizing them.

“Let’s try to take a deep breath in… aaaand out”, she says. “That’s good work for the day. I want us (by us… she means me), to get to a point where we’re embracing ambiguity & hoping in life a little bit more”.

She puts two books into my hands: bell hooks’ All About Love on top. And right underneath it was Pema Chodron’s The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. She ain’t slick.

When I leave her office, I sigh in the key of East Coast born Black girl, wondering why the fuck she wants me to trust in life… to continue this activity of hope… doesn’t she know mass incarceration is real? Doesn’t she know the Orange Cheeto was elected? And I’m pretty sure I’ll have to be way more fastidious about cyber security now that *ding ding!

And the elevator open, goes down, deposits me back onto the first floor. Past the coffee shop. Out into the streets.

My therapist is convinced that I’m not bad at hope. I’m sure she’s right. I just have a hard time living into the Hallmark card, bootstrap theology version of what we’ve normalized hope to BE. My friend Ashon says that consistently showing up to therapy is a type of hope too. I’ll take that for now.

II. I went to church with my family every Sunday as a child. It was a nondenominational and charismatic church. I still remember the routine. Wake up. 8 am Sunday school. Praise and worship (for those who aren’t familiar with charismatic church spaces just know that during this section, we had to wait for everyone to catch the Spirit, shout, fall out, & get back up before it was all through) Then, there was the sermon. The altar call. (Where people might decide to pick up a shout again). After church conversations. Brunch – that was really around dinner time. Readying for school in the morning. Sleep. Nowadays, I recognize that it was the equivalent of a full work day. It took me a full 5 years post “adulthood” to sleep in on Sundays without it feeling like a crisis.

“Now faith is the substance of things HOPED for…”

I grew up feeling like hope was something I needed to ask for. Pray for. Wait for. Hope was expected to look a certain way. So, I got familiar with its mask. I smiled when I didn’t want to. I offered myself quick platitudes and Scripture when the emotional reality was too much. I was real inspirational those days.

On Sundays, I made my supplications at the altar and imagined warm light falling on me. Older women placed their thin, cool hands on my head and wrapped my body in white sheets. They put their hands on my belly and asked for spiritual fire to consume all doubts. I thought it could help me to be reborn.

At night, worry descended upon me again as I pulled the comforter up. I recounted the pending catastrophes – what might happen at school the next day, at church the next week, when I arrived home, when I got on the bus. I’m a Taurus, Aries-rising, long time maker of mental lists and plans. Yet, despite my lists, scribbled in bright neon post its around the bed, the anxieties followed me into dreams.

My Grandmother said I had a “sensitive disposition”. My father said I had “bad nerves”. My psychiatrist said, “She has general anxiety disorder”. So, hope is a complicated thing.
III. Reading tarot grounds me in so many ways. I’ve got a few favorites in the cards: The Queen of Cups, the Hermit, the High Priestess, the Nine of Pentacles. The Tower tends to make my hands shake. The Knight of Wands reminds me of the charm & the quick temper of my father.

I’m still working out my relationship with the Star. You could say she’s got the iconography of hope.

I invite her out for coffee in my mind on the rare occasion that the Star chooses to visit me. In the tarot, the Star comes after the Tower has fallen down – after all that they’ve known has fallen in fire & light. And here they kneel, drawing up water in the dim glow of the stars. They are naked.

“Don’t overthink this, Jade”, she tells me. As I hold the card between my fingers she reminds me, “Let’s start our work by drinking more water. Hope means relaxing into that which we do not know yet. And that’s going to take some hydration. Allow your body more time to be naked – this body, this chronically pained body, this sometimes-walks-with-a-cane body, this Black body – allow it space. The rest will come soon enough”.
IV. Hope is a kind of suspension. Sometimes, when I look at my lovers face, it morphs into the consummation of my vulnerabilities and fears. Anxiety makes it easy to spin their locs into all of the reasons that the moment is fleeting: brevity of life, emotional stress, the inevitability of death…you know, the light stuff. But sometimes, when I have enough rest & food & medicine & ancestor help… I can push pause on that tape. I can find enough space to choose another path and hold onto it for as long as I’m able to – until it is replicated again in this life or the next. Counting their locs, one by one, for the reasons I’m so grateful. I’m practicing. Hope.

Hope is easiest to do when I’m showing up for my written work, editing what doesn’t work, trying to create new language, & reclaim other language. Using a Black queer radical imagination to see new ways forward. It’s sitting my ass down, writing shit that doesn’t only – SOLELY – respond to Whiteness or ableism or homo-antagonism – stuck in a feedback loop: inciting incident, think piece, praises or hate filled comments, “Say both your words AND mine-for-me. Give me digestible works that I can quickly share with my (racist, ableist, homo-antagonistic) facebook friends so they don’t have to do their own work”.

V. This year, I’ve taken up the spiritual practice of allowing myself some room to dream and to tell my stories. I want to tell you that I come from a long line of Black American storytellers. You probably don’t know them… but my aunts, uncles, my father can roll their trip to the grocery store into 45 minutes of entertainment with a life lesson at the end. For example…

“My family was fighting at the 2008-2009ish reunion. I don’t remember why. I do remember that my cousin processed this issue by telling a story about friends who enjoyed waffles, and friends who enjoyed pancakes, and how they needed to realize that both of those breakfast dishes benefit from syrup. Therefore, it’s wise to share your syrup if both parties want to stay away from dry ass breakfast dishes. It’s also wise to choose your fights when it comes to family, if you can help it.

I would tell ya’ll the stories – in my own dialect– about how I’m always doing the most. This is not self-deprecation. I’ve taken a poll and most of my friends… and coworkers… agree. Doing the most… is what I do. You want a report? You’re getting report, graphics, and likely a sequined outfit when I present the report to you. I could literally have a series of “Doing the Most” Chronicles. I would always have something to write about and we would both be cackling” (snippet from: Because I’m Not Solely Writing About DT for the Next 4 Years).

A full blown cackle – might that be categorized as hope too? I’ll have to take that for now.

VI. On some Saturday nights, I bring my body to the dance hall and twerk like my life depends on it. My feet, cramping & swelling with chronic plantar fasciitis, hold me up for as long as I need them to – even if it’s just for a few songs. Ass up & down, defying the laws of physics, that’s a part of the way I hope too. And that’s gonna have to be good enough for now. Because that’s what I got. Showing up. Writing. Laughing. Dancing. Staring at my lover’s face. Drinking more water. Being naked. And understanding that while hope fuels the collective work of artivists & activists, it is also an individual practice.

VII. My therapists usually asks, “What are you up to nowadays?” I told her, “Writing about hope, isn’t it ironic?!” She wanted me to bring this piece in so we can discuss it. I will not. It’s for us. It’s for those of us, that are here, that find hope BOTH within & outside of reach – yet need it to exist in this world. If I remember to go to therapy next week, I’ll take out a piece of paper, and roll it out on her desk. It will read: I’m practicing it now… the shit is still complicated”.

This biographical essay is written for the #52essays2017 challenge by Vanessa Martir.

I. It is a brave thing to write about Spirit. It is much easier to write, solely, about God, or colonial Christianity, or even decolonizing Christianity. Yet, matters of Spirit are often unwieldy. We can theorize them, but even that comes with its risks. Keating’s exploration of the spiritual work of Gloria Anzaldúa notes:

After all, those of us working in academic settings are trained to rely almost exclusively on rational thought, anti-spiritual forms of logical reasoning….

We might admire Anzaldúa’s bold spirit vision yet fear that if we explore it in our work, we will harm our careers. Not only will our colleagues scoff at us, but we will have difficulty publishing such explorations. As Lara (2005) suggests, these fears can be intensified for Chicanas and other women of colors who are often already viewed as interlopers in the academy. (Keating, 2008, p. 55)

However, matters of Spirit are often unrelenting. They show up, most often, when I want to write fluffy, easily-shareable pieces. They are determined.

Whenever we speak of Spirit, or spirits, we are both aided and blocked by our language. “What do you mean by Spirit”? In the past few months, I’ve been asked this question in so many different ways. I never give specifics because it’s typically already been decided I’m in need of re-Evangelizing.

The women in my family are always negotiating spirit*. For the purposes of this piece, I define it as the essences / life forces which we cannot always understand… yet find ourselves either intrigued or repelled by.

The women in my family are brilliant and can intellectualize most things. Yet, I often hear behind the words, because I came from them. And there is much concern about holy & good spirits – “wait,do you believe in one Holy Spirit or many other spirits” – staying away from evil spirits. But then there are the metaphorical spirits* – the energies & memories of the things we’d rather forget or leave alone. There is always the risk of being blocked by language, of being misunderstood, of being seen as “at-(spiritual)-risk”. It is a brave thing to write about Spirit*.

II. My Gramma was always intrigued with the concept of exorcism. She chased the next revival services, healing events, and traveling “prophets” like ones who would chase a storm. Seeing where it began. Seeing how it ended.

She had a library of books on methods to keep evil spirits away. A hobby? A passion? A fear? All three?

As a child, she would tell me about these excursions of spirit. Sometimes, I could travel along to a service – if she felt it was safe enough. She kept a vial of oil, anointed for the task of both blessing and protecting – warding off evil & inviting in good. “Spirits ain’t nothing to play with”. She told me, “You’ll know when it’s a bad one. Your stomach turns. Your throat feels like it’s hot and dry. Look into the eyes. See if it looks like a soul is behind there“.

She often retired to the back room to pray. It used to be my play room, but I grew too big for the walls. I grew too big for the house, itself. I grew too big for the entire state, I suppose. Years later, she asked me to mind my size – and help her clear out that back room.

I spent hours on the dusty pink carpet, eating home cooked meals, pausing to look up at the sparkly popcorn ceiling, and sneaking journals full of Bible study notes from 1985 into the garbage bin. She would catch me, occasionally. “Grandma, I can type these up for you”. But she preferred the hard copies all around her like a shield. So, in one month, I could only clear one chest. After she passed, there was so much more clearing to do.

III.
“Mother, are spirits real?”
“Why are you worried about this?”
“I just am…”
“You’ve got God inside. You have nothing to fear”.

My mother’s jaw clenches when she is trying very hard to be patient. My Gramma often regaled her with stories about faith healers, far and wide. How much she was intrigued by them. My mother is a medical professional with complicated thoughts around faith healing (life sets up the most beautifully ironic situations). She listened carefully, because this was her Mother, and they were good friends. Only I could see, standing underneath her with my childhood body, that her jaws were clenched & her smile required effort.

IV.
I began getting bored with my church at 16 years old. How many more Sundays could I watch the parishioners march up to the altar, seeking more deliverance from the spirits which were real, imagined, a mix of both, who knows? I craved “something intellectual”. I was young and wanted more of everything, really. So, I took a sharp turn, tried out Reformed Calvinism. I was intrigued by their use of the word “eschatological” , the thought that perhaps life could be figured out by a few “simple” tenets, and the added surprise of walking in to church with multitudes of handsome brown men. I was young and thought I knew everything.

I theorized everything then – the life of “spirits” didn’t seem to be worth as much exploration as the “doctrine of election”. I stopped dancing at religious services. I kept up with the rhetoric – until I realized that believing in “totally depravity” left my soul dank & depressed. Until I saw how much violence it did. Until I realized that beyond my Black church, most of the prominent scholars in the denomination were White. They believed & taught that a spiritually elected-somewhat-Divinely-yet-arbitrarily-decided group would access heaven. The implications of that horrified me. I was young, and old enough to know I needed to get out.

In the dark, deep, blue glow, the Hermit carries one single light and walking stick. They are walking across the cold, craggy mountains. They are looking down, inward. They are reaching deeper spirituality. Some people feel this card is a bit obscure (and sometimes, I agree haha). However, the Hermit is a guide – that sense of “knowing” inside of ourselves when we need a “container”, a “cocoon”, somewhere dark, quiet, and even a bit windy to shake up our previous understandings. A figure, resembling a Hermit, found me in a church in the middle of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania (population 50,000). I was living in the LITERAL, actual mountains during this time. “The Hermit” showed me that there was a healthier way of Christianity & of spirituality, itself.

Then, I moved to Smalltownsville, SC (population 9,000) to continue my journey in further shades of solitude. I spent time with myself. I didn’t write.

VI. It is now 2017 & a few conversations with friends have turned into a nonprofit organization which “centers the voices, teaching, practices, and wisdom of People of Color at the intersections of mysticism and activism”. It is interesting that it is built on Christian contemplative tradition, deconstructing what this means, and breaking open space to include indigineity & diasporic religious traditions – a chance to bring our ancestral knowledge out of “hiding”. Equal parts Howard Thurman, Barbara Holmes, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, the saints, the Christian mystics, and our Grand-ancestors teaching us prayers, songs, and ways to invite God in. Equal parts “what we know” and “what we’re open to discover”. Someone inboxes and says it sounds like potential to the slippery slopes of “idolatry”.

I wish I could explain how western colonization has prompted us to see these practices as “idolatrous”. I wish I could explain how it was demonized… not inherently, demonic. I wish I could read them the quote I read today – from the long process of resource sharing we’ve undertaken. I would read slowly:

“Ostensibly, all women in colonial Mexico and Latin America, like their counterparts throughout the Christian world, were suspected of being witches on the basis of gender, but women of colonized groups were suspect on multiple grounds. Indian women, African-origin women, and racially mixed women—whether Indo-mestiza or Afro-mestiza—were suspect by virtue of being female, by virtue of deriving from non-Christian, or “diabolic” religions and cultures, and by virtue of being colonized or enslaved people who might rebel and use their alleged magical power at any moment. —Antonia Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–1848, as seen in Lara’s 2005 work.

Most of all, I wish I could explain that I see this as “spiritual activism” (Keating, 2008) – a way forward that allows us to get into deeper touch with God, self, & others, as we fight for social justice in this world.

But I sense their fear. I’m close to them. And I swallow these words with my morning tea. Perhaps, another time. Perhaps, never.

VII.
The next night, I dreamed of my Gramma. First, I described the dream on Facebook (because #millenial). In this dream, I was preparing for my meditation practice. I wore bright yellow.

My Grandmother sat where my teacher usually sits. She wore white and gold. She said to me: “I want you to meditate on this mantra ‘I ain’t got time’.
(Let me pause here to say that everyone who is familiar with AAVE / African American vernacular English understands all of the nuances of that statement. It is not concretely translatable in Standard American English. ‘I ain’t got time’ means something between “I have time, but refuse to engage something”, and “Something is distasteful to me and / or hazardous to my health, so I will reserve my time for the things that help me to thrive”. This is a loose translation).

I cackled, as per usual. She smiled and said, “Yepp, say it, ‘I ain’t got time”. Sometimes in your life, there will be giant pizzas rolling toward you – moving fast…”

This was very typical of her – to take a somewhat random object & work it into a life lesson.

“In that moment, you have to decide. Do I want to take a bite out of that? You can only take a bite with it moving that fast. Do I want to knock it down and share it with friends? That’s an option too. And sometimes, you’ll say to yourself, “I don’t even WANT pizza” & just let it roll by. That’s when you say to yourself, “I ain’t got time”.

I woke up to the Twitter-news that Mercury was in Pisces & that my dreams might hold some keys for deep learning at this time (@starheal). It’s funny how that works.

VIII.
I believe that art allows us forms of exorcism – appeasing the spirits of things our families, sociocultural histories, and personal journeys leave us with. Moreover, it invites us to welcome in all that is “true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious” (Phil. 4:8-9, The Bible).

My Gramma’s lived in enough awareness of what could be bad. These days, she’s telling me “She / we / I ain’t got time”. And the only spirits* I deal with are good ones.

Let me tell you about one of my favorite people on this side of the sphere: Ebony Janice of the Free People project. In addition to her vlogs, justice work, and philanthropy, Ebony Janice is the author of a few books. #PutyourfriendsonFriday

The point is that in one of these books she coins the term #ChristianDemonicFilter. This is the notion that everything that is not EXPLICITLY in the Bible with EXPLICIT EXPLICITNESS in all EXPLICITRY… is not just unknown… it’s demonic.

And anyone who grow up under the influence of folks who interpreted the Bible literally knows exactly what I’m talking about:

Under this type of teaching, you begin to (either ignorantly or arrogantly) think that the only acceptable spiritual practices happen within the confines of Evangelical Christianity.

This post is not intended to debate on whether malevolent forces are real. It’s to share a personal understanding: the devil, demons, and / or malevolent forces are not involved in every thing we do not OR willingly refuse to… understand.

When I was in high school, there was a “minister” who came to prominence by the name of G. Craig Lewis and Ex Ministries. In high school Bible study, we watched one of Lewis’ dvds (lol) in which he posited that hip hop music & artists were demonic. As in… literally transferring demons through our “ear gate”.

Ya’ll think I’m kidding. I can feel it through the computer screen. Yes, this is a real dude. Yes, he really taught such drivel. And yes… this was the topic of an entire high school Bible study. #IdontlooklikewhatIbeenthrough (LOL).

It seems far-fetched now, but I can see how this type of teaching came to prominence at the time. It was the time where everything, anything could be cause to cry out “Demonic”! And unfortunately, some of this rhetoric still persists. It often confounds me.

As a note, if it was not clear, these same spaces are where some of our chakra centers are!

Given this logic, we could also have an entire conversation here on the ideas of cultural arrogance / dominance that comes from Christian religious privilege. Because these are practices that have also been in place for thousands of years. For now, I will say that this is a thing… and folks have to do better about acknowledging it – and fixing it.

According to this logic, there are thousands of trap doors – thousands of levers that the enemy can pull. So, as you can imagine, this gives way to a dominating fear… a fear that renders people incapable of exploring anything outside of their own understandings of the Bible (oooorrr their pastor’s understanding).

This simply wasn’t a sustainable way to live for me. The concept was toxic because it bred fear, constant penance, and even a bit of arrogance. And this is not the type of person, I believe, we are actualized in the earth to be.

I’ve benefited from a variety of spiritual practices through the years but in the past 3 years I have been increasingly vocal about it. My friends will tell you, if you come into my home with low vibes… we’re doing an aura cleansing at the door. Saging or burning palo santo happens at least once a week in my home and as we speak, my crystal is charged to assist me in the work I’m doing on my crown chakra.

I’ve learned to sit in meditation and it’s absolutely necessary and non-negotiable for me to do this. It calms me, grounds me, helps me remember why I’m here. And I do all of this in addition to prayer and other forms of charismatic spiritual practice I grew up with in the nondenominational (but Pentecostal-leaning) Black church (the irony is that those things aren’t spelled out literally in the Bible either… they are a product of cultural / ancestral lineage i.e. shouting, “catching” the Holy Ghost, etc). These aren’t necessarily “new” practices for me – it’s simply that for a while, I had to go through the process of being unbothered. It is through pursuing these practices that I have found no slippery slope – simply more expressions of & languages for the Divine / G-d in my life!

This year, I decided to fully embrace the things that once caused me inordinate (and unnecessary) amounts of fear. I decided to trust that God was within me; that God would guide to me the things that served me… and away from the things that would harm me. This year, I decided to pursue the “spiritual technologies” that called out to me the most (Lomax, 2016).

Through reading & speaking with various ministers & healers, I also began to understand a bit more about my social location as a Black American Christian. Perhaps you can imagine my *mind-blown* moment, when I realized that in a not-so-distant-past, Black ministers were often diviners as well. There was room for spiritual syncretism (and there still is, in many traditions). For example, in the 1997 text Conjure and Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: Religious Elements in African American Magic, Chireau unpacks:

“For generations, magic has persisted in black culture, often obscured but deemed compatible with other spiritual traditions. Its widespread appeal is attested to by numerous accounts describing conjuring relics, supernatural rituals…among African American churchgoers. From slavery days to the present, practitioners and clients of the magical arts have moved freely across ecclesial boundaries, drawing copiously from the symbols and language of Christianity”. (p. 226)

Yet, given all this, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve been asked “But are you still ‘saved’ (in the Evangelical sense)” more than enough this year. I’ve realized that this question is not necessarily about me and that it is, to some level, socialized into people. On an individual level, there will be (and are) practices that we may be uncomfortable with. However, I think it’s time to (at least) consider that there’s toxicity in believing that everything unknown, unexplored through evangelical Christian lenses or fundamental Christian lenses = demonic.